Wikipedia’s understanding of consensus is even worse. Wikipedia seems to treat consensus as a synonym for unanimity. Its testing methods allow an infinite loop to form where the casual observer can’t differentiate between a controversial proposal and consensus. I think those were mistakes.

These famous-but-imperfect implementations frequently lead to misdirected rants which seem to misunderstand consensus as requiring perpetual bikeshedding. Apache’s implementation is rather better – and it may surprise you to learn that our co-op is mostly run by consensus.

There are two key differences which I feel makes consensus work for us: we’ve set limits beforehand on some decisions where we need to act fast – where not making a decision would usually be the same as making a bad decision – and our methods of testing for consensus are better. We test for consensus with secret-at-vote-time-but-published-after straw polls, or using Crowd Wise by email.

I summarise Crowd Wise as follows: gather all ideas plus option 0 (do nothing) if possible, carry out a de Borda (preference) voting round 1, merge/amend/consolidate ideas, voting round 2 if needed. It does still work better if participants put their ego aside a little and co-operate, but it does put limits on non-co-operators.

Anyway, as described in Xana/ xana2/ bamamba/ Why Russ is wrong, debian isn’t exactly using consensus much at the moment, anyway. Should we try to fix its bugs? Do you know other projects where consensus is working?

My trusty Asus seems to have succumbed to graphic fault. I got an OS-free Zoostorm as its replacement, to avoid paying the MS tax. Zoostorm is one brand that Clevo laptops are sold under.

It was actually a Clevo 7872-9040/A built Jan 13. I installed Debian 6 on it. The download button was easy to spot on the front page, but I actually used mini.iso so I could use a smaller usb stick. The first larger stick I tried was a dud and I’m not sure where other sticks went in the move.

The base installation went fine and most things went well, but the wireless networking and sound required an upgrade, but more on that next tech post.

Interesting stuff is happening again and I’m doing a bit of travelling where I’m not driving much, so I can write some blog posts. If this train stops bouncing quite so much!

I think most readers are interested in technology and collaborative work, so it makes sense to alternate those two themes most of the time. So that’s what I’ll aim for, probably a few posts each week for the next few weeks.

Let me know in the comments or our co-op’s contract form if there’s anything in particular you’d like us to cover, else I’ll start with my recent experiences installing Debian 6 on a new laptop and the fun of running a business at tax return time.

Contrary to http://blog.einval.com/2012/11/13, I’ve just been and voted (four times, or 2×2 – one for me, one as a proxy) for a police and crime commissioner. I agree with much of what Steve writes and more besides. It’s a very bad election. But I voted for three main reasons: Firstly, parties I don’t like will get their core vote out anyway. If we don’t turn put, the election becomes more about party structures, less the popular wish. Secondly, democracy is imperfect, but it’s the best we’ve got. I’ve interacted with two appointed police authorities and they’re rubbish and they’re untouchable/unaccountable. Thirdly, I expect policing to be a hot topic here if the government do actually try to build the incinerator that 65,000 people/90+% voted against. Best try to get a non-gov commissioner now, I think. So that’s why I’ve voted and encouraged other members of our co-op to vote.

Sometimes I felt at home at Cooperatives United, like at the wonderful fringe dinner at Eighth Day last Thursday night. Sometimes I felt overwhelmed by the flood, like at the cooperative party workshop on Friday morning.

The workshop addressed the key questions: why do we want cooperative politicians, what could they do and what are the needs and challenges facing them?

Personally, I felt the first is obvious and the answer is all the second. It’s both frustrating (few ask why other movements want to influence politicians) and reassuring (no taboo topics) that the first question is asked.

There were many fascinating answers to the other two questions from around the world. As so often with workshops, few hard conclusions were reached, but I think some interesting conversations were started there, which we might hear again in the future.

What would I call the top challenge? Persuading open and transparent co-op members to join the party. I’ve written about my difficulty with joining political parties in the past, as some forms of collective responsibility are against my beliefs and I’m not sure that joining a small party will help anyone much, but I think I’ll take another look at the cooperative party, all the same.

The picture above is of the Welney washes, some miles south-west of Lynn. It’s a stunning wetland environment, and it surprises me every time the train crosses the floods, as it did on the way to Manchester. And yes, I’ve shoehorned a picture I liked into this article!

I sometimes ask other co-ops and social enterprises to publish things as web pages, PDFs, ODFs or basically any standard format instead of Microsoft Word Doc files.

Doc files have the practical problem that they look different even in different versions of Microsoft Word, but also, Microsoft is not a co-operative (a private-sector firm oft accused of bring a monopolist, in fact!), whereas PDF, ODF and so on are more co-operatively developed, so I feel that we should support the better alternatives.

The usual first move is to PDFs. I don’t like them as much as web pages (it’s a file to download and open in an app or plugin, rather than something I can just read without interrupting my flow), but the process is basically the same. Just upload a PDF where you would have uploaded a Doc.

Occasionally, I get a reply saying that PDF is no better than Word because Adobe are also a private-sector supplier and therefore not much different from Microsoft (not as big, though?), while doc files are an ISO standard too.

Microsoft have only given part of Doc (called Docx) to the ISO process and there is a limited range of other readers for it, which suffer the same “different on every version” problem as Word as far as I’ve seen. There’s also the added complication that Microsoft Office reportedly won’t comply with the Strict standard before Office 2013…

More widely, Microsoft are so un-cooperative that they don’t seem to want to share a marketplace with anyone else and have been hauled in front of regulators numerous times for monopoly offences. They seem to be on their way there again.

So Adobe is not great (does its best to continue marketing and extending PDF as if it had sole control), but Microsoft is much worse.

So when I arrived on Thursday (ten minutes early despite a cancelled train, thanks to help from the cooperative fellow traveller mentioned last post), I was in time to go to a workshop on media cooperatives led by @theBoyler.

It wasn’t what I expected. It seemed to concentrate on the opportunity presented by the current awful state of news media companies in many countries and the technology-driven changes to their businesses. For example, WordPress is a viable way to start – online first, then move into print later.

There are already news co-ops in places where there would be no local news media. The challenge well be how to overcome what I’d call “spoiling” or “scorched earth” tactics from departing media companies.

Some local news media owners are looking for a way out. One obvious one is to turn a local title into a minor variation on a regional-or-worse service or publication, maybe by selling it to a bigger media business. That loses some audience but many will put up with it, so it avoids creating an obvious gap in the market for more truly local reporting.

Much else was covered and the audience suggested tons of examples. I’m not sure we reached many firm conclusions, but there seem quite a few examples to learn from (Morning Star, taz, …) and Dave Boyle’s work is continuing…

I’m on my way back from Cooperatives United. I haven’t quite posted as much as I planned (just a few microblogs/tweets) because the event was so much bigger and busier than I expected!

So I’m writing this on my (6 hour) journey home. We’ve attended Congress before and it was nothing like that. I was expecting something maybe 50% larger than last time and this seemed more like 300%. I wonder if Cooperatives UK have some numbers… Maybe it reflects the growing strength of the cooperative economy that they reported in the summer just gone.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised on the journey from Norfolk. I made a brief informal travellers’ co-op with an actor from Micawber Theatre company (tickets on sale now for shows in Ipswich and London) to overcome the challenge of East Midlands Trains. Unprompted by me, he blamed the shocking service on the big train businesses being unaccountable to passengers.

Maybe that’s it. Cooperatives are accountable and people are ready for more responsible post-capitalist businesses. That’s why coops are doing well now and Cooperatives United was such a lively event.

I’ll write more tomorrow. Now if you’ll excuse me, we’ve got to get off and change carriages because East Midlands Trains couldn’t be bothered to tell us the train divides at Nottingham until long after we boarded!

Credit Unions are financial co-operatives where a community’s savings are used to fund other community borrowing and both savers and borrowers can become members. Thursday 18 October 2012 is International Credit Union Day, as well as being in the United Nations International Year of Co-operatives.

I’m a member of my local credit union. I can pay in at my bank or any PayPoint and withdraw by bank transfer. If you’re fed up with the fat cat plc bankers, there’s no better time to Move Your Money in general and Find Your Credit Union (international visitors, start at WOCCU) in particular, is there?